In campaign mode today, Sen. Patty Murray (joined by Sen. Maria Cantwell) was in town promoting a small business lending bill at Wallingford’s Tutta Bella Neapolitan Pizerria.
Tutta Bella is a successful small business owned by Joe Fugere. (It was recently named the best independent pizzeria in the nation.) Fugere stood with Sens. Murray and Cantwell at the podium, along with a contractor, a bookstore owner, and a few other Seattle small business leaders.
They all told the same story: they’re responsible adults who have always paid their bills on time, and they have managed their businesses well. And in what Fugere called the “economic Armageddon” of 2008, they all lost access to credit from national and local banks. The root of the problem? Fugere called it the “recklessness of Wall Street businesses.”
Murray and Cantwell have been pushing the Small Business Lending Fund, a bill that would give community banks $30 billion for the specific purpose of enabling loans to small businesses.
Republicans blocked a final vote on the vote on the bill with a 58-42 party-line vote on June 29, and Murray took a shot at them for it. “Senate Republicans decided they cared more about blocking a Democratic bill than helping small business owners in their states.”
However, the Republicans are calling the bill a bailout, benefiting small banks this time.
Dino Rossi’s campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Morris said, “the fund they’re talking about allows the treasury dept to purchase stocks and other debt instruments from small banks at taxpayer expense,” and she referred to the lending fund as “the baby TARP bill.”
Julie Edwards, Sen. Murray’s campaign spokeswoman, pointed out that Republican senators like Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL) have disputed allegations that the fund is a bailout. “This has nothing to do with that. These are small banks. This is the banker you know down the street,” LeMieux said on the floor of the Senate.
The Rossi camp also pointed out that just last week, Murray voted against an amendment to extend Bush tax cuts for small businesses. Footnote though: The Washington Post recently published an article questioning the the notion that small business would benefit from keeping the cuts in place.
It’s worth quoting the Post at length:
This claim is misleading. If, as proposed, the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire for the highest earners, the vast majority of small businesses will be unaffected. Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets — individuals earning more than about $170,000 a year and families earning more than about $210,000 a year.
And just as most small businesses aren’t owned by people in the top income brackets, most people in the top income brackets don’t rely mainly on small-business income: According to the Tax Policy Center, such proceeds make up a majority of income for about 40 percent of households in the top income bracket and a third of households in the second-highest bracket. If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn’t the way to go — it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don’t make most of their money off those businesses.
